


Flyers Orange

by McSpot



Series: Home [1]
Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Crack Treated Seriously, Gen, Philadelphia Flyers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-07
Updated: 2019-11-07
Packaged: 2021-01-25 01:41:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21348172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/McSpot/pseuds/McSpot
Summary: James never really noticed it in Dallas. Maybe it was because he was young and the league was new and exciting and he hadn’t settled into himself enough yet. Maybe it was because they played so infrequently that he couldn’t put the trend together.Maybe it was because he couldn’t really grow a proper beard yet.Gingers always come home in the end.
Series: Home [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1539196
Comments: 25
Kudos: 104





	Flyers Orange

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally posted [on Tumblr](https://swedishgoaliemafia.tumblr.com/post/187526652764/flyers-orange) on 9/6/19. There was a conversation about how James Neal had a ginger beard and ashipwreckcoast remarked "how has he not come to the Flyers yet" and then "my captain shall lay claim." And my brain is weird so I wrote this.
> 
> I'd originally never planned to post it on AO3, but I have a very belated Halloween fic on the way that will require having read this first to understand it...

James never really noticed it in Dallas. Maybe it was because he was young and the league was new and exciting and he hadn’t settled into himself enough yet. Maybe it was because they played so infrequently that he couldn’t put the trend together.

Maybe it was because he couldn’t really grow a proper beard yet.

It wasn’t until he was traded to Pittsburgh that James started to notice that things felt…strange, when the team played Philadelphia.

“Is rivalry, Lazy,” Geno would say, smacking him on the back. “Feel sick in Philly, means you good Penguin.”

“The Flyers always give me indigestion,” Flower had agreed.

Nobody seemed to really get it though, that, that _feeling_ James would get when they played the Flyers.

When Philadelphia played them at home, it wasn’t so bad. James maybe felt a little…more aware than usual, of their players on the ice. Felt compelled to track them, like something in his gut was dragging his eyes back to their guys, Giroux and Couturier and Voracek.

_That’s good hockey sense, recognize the biggest threats_, he could hear Coach’s voice saying, but…James didn’t feel nearly so strongly about watching guys like Briere or Simmonds or, _fuck_, fucking _Jagr_.

But a flash of orange on orange and there his eyes went, lurching along and sweeping his heart with them.

It was weird, but controllable, mostly. He just had to school himself, brace for it, ground himself in Coach’s muttered game plans and Geno’s elbow digging into his gut on the bench.

Games in Philly were so, so much worse. If he was distracted in Pittsburgh, he felt absolutely useless in Philly itself. The city was hard, but the arena was impossible. As soon as he set foot on Broad Street he was struck with this warm, heavy, syrupy feeling, like waking up in a patch of sunlight on a day off and having nothing more to do but stretch and roll around and revel in it.

Standing on the ice in Wells Fargo Center felt more_ right_ than any other experience he’d ever had in the NHL, and that was fairly disorienting as a member of a Pittsburgh sports team.

“Do you think they put drugs in the water?” he’d hissed at Paul one day after morning skate in Philly.

Paul had narrowed his eyes at him from behind his glasses, like he was trying to decide if this was the type of idiocy he wanted to indulge.

“Who’s drugging you now?”

“The Flyers! I can’t be the only one who feels it, right? You play the Flyers, you feel like you’re like, stoned and slowed down but also like really excited, like you’re on a first date? It’s got to be drugs, right? But it sort of happens in Pittsburgh too, when they play us, but not so bad, so maybe it’s drugs in the air? Do they give off fumes?”

He half-expected Paul to make a dry remark about some of them being dirty enough to give off toxic-fumes, because that would be a very Paulie-thing to say.

He didn’t expect Paul’s eyes to go wide. “You notice that?”

James frowned. “Uh, yeah? So that means you feel it too, right? I’m not just losing my mind because Claude Giroux has me like, hypnotized?”

A yelp was startled from him as Paul caught his chin in his hands tilting it upward and peering closely.

“Paulie, what the fuck?!”

Paul muttered and shook his head, letting James go as if it had never happened. “They shouldn’t…it’s not _that_ dark, surely it shouldn’t be affecting you like this.”

“Like…like what? Like the drugs? Are there really drugs? Does the league know about this?”

But Paul was shaking his head, crossing his arms and looking away, the same move he always did when he was deep in thought.

“Not officially, but there’s enough former players there, someone must know something. Look, it doesn’t matter, they should leave you alone.”

Well that was clear as mud. “Paulie, _who_ should-”

“Don’t worry about it,” Paul interrupted. “You’re not their type, they should leave you alone. But…don’t let a Flyer catch you alone, ever. Got it?”

James didn’t have many plans on hanging around the enemy, but he nodded anyways, until Paulie looked appeased.

“I mean, yeah, it’s not like I plan to go be best friends with Giroux or something.”

He startled again when Paul grabbed at his wrist, gripping tight enough that it actually hurt. “Did he approach you?”

“Did he _what_? Paulie, what the fuck?” He tried to tug his arm away, but Paul’s white-knuckled grip grew stronger.

“Giroux, did he talk to you?”

“Oh yeah, we talked at the last book club meeting – _no_, Paulie, I don’t talk to Claude Giroux, now fucking let go of me!”

Paul blinked as if coming out of a trance, shaking his head and owlishly looking at James’s wrist in his grip, then up at James. Abruptly, he dropped James’s arm and took a step back, removing his glasses to rub at his eyes.

“Sorry. I’m sorry. Just…be careful around them, alright? All of the Flyers, but especially Giroux. Don’t let them get you alone. And that whole…feeling…you just have to ignore that, okay?”

He held up a hand to keep James from interjecting. “I know it’s weird and uncomfortable sometimes – or too comfortable – but you just have to ignore it, okay? And keep it quiet, don’t go talking about it with like, Sid or something. It’s just something you have to endure a few times a year, you’ll be fine.”

James made a face. “I mean, _yeah_, of course I’ll be fine, but like what even is it?”

He wasn’t prepared for how Paul just stared at him, eyes tired behind his glasses, but scrutinizing.

Paul shook his head. “A mistake,” he muttered, “It’d have to be.”

That was the last time Paul would discuss it with him, but it wasn’t the last time weird shit happened with Philly.

The weird shit got weirder when Pittsburgh played Philly in the playoffs for the first time in James’s career.

It was his second year making the playoffs, and after last season’s loss in game seven of the first round, the team was eager to do better this year – and there was no way they could lose to the Flyers in the first round.

But they did lose, in six games. James tripled his playoffs points production from last year, but it didn’t make a damned difference.

And at the end of Game Six, as the Penguins had to shake hands with the Flyers after facing a crushing 5-1 defeat, James’s perfunctory handshakes were interrupted by Giroux pressing a hand to his shoulder, pinning him in place.

And then another hand, glove shucked off, grabbed his jaw.

“Dude, what the fuck?” James hissed, trying to wrench himself away.

But Giroux’s smile was growing, smug, bright, like he’d finally solved a mystery and everything had clicked into place.

“That explains it,” he murmured, sounding delighted with himself.

He patted James’s jaw, and it would have felt condescending if it wasn’t for how his hand dragged down, almost…_petting_.

“I’ve seen you now,” Giroux said, and he patted James’s chest with his other hand and skated past him to continue the handshakes.

James blinked once, twice. He jolted when the next person in line dragged him in for a rough hug.

“Oh buddy,” Scott Hartnell said in his ear, “You’re never getting away now.”

It was objectively bizarre and subjectively incredibly intimidating, but standing there in the middle of Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia, surrounded by screaming Flyers fans who were celebrating his team’s failure, it didn’t feel scary or weird.

It felt warm and soothing and comforting.

When James got back to Pittsburgh, he drank and drank and drank until he couldn’t feel anything anymore.

He started to understand what Paul had meant after that, about being careful around shady Flyers players. He didn’t face the Flyers in the playoffs again after that, but every game since then, Giroux always went out of his way to nod at James, winking like Giroux was teasing him, letting him in on some shared joke.

Except James didn’t know the punch line, or the setup for that matter. He also didn’t know why it made him feel so warm every time, but Giroux was fully welcome to stop at any time.

(He would be heartbroken if Giroux stopped.)

Some of the other Flyers did it too, but there was little rhyme or reason. Guys like Raffl and Voracek acted like they were old friends, and guys like Simmonds or Streit didn’t look twice at him.

James endeavored to ignore them all with a passion. No matter what team he was on, it wasn’t theirs, and he wasn’t going to buy into their mind games and their not-drugs that messed with his head.

Certain jerseys had always appealed to James. The gold Preds jerseys were controversial for some people, but James liked the way he looked in them. He liked the way he looked in Flames red too. Something about warm colors just seemed to match him in a way that the blacks and greys of Pittsburgh and Vegas didn’t. (Dallas green was right out.)

He wasn’t stunned by Calgary trading him, even if the destination was a surprise. At that point James was open to just about anything, even if he had no illusions of single-handedly fixing the leviathan of Edmonton’s chronic failure to launch when even Connor McDavid could not.

But he liked the jersey. Maybe it was a little ugly, but it was an iconic jersey to be sure.

And he liked the orange. Orange felt like a good color to be wearing, something new for him. The season hadn’t even started yet, but pulling on an orange Oilers practice jersey felt special. It wasn’t perfect, wasn’t quite what he wanted – he wasn’t sure what he _did_ want, but he thought he’d know it when he saw it.

But Oilers orange felt pretty damn good, and James hadn’t felt that way for a while.

So he let himself relax, let himself get settled in to his new place in Edmonton, think about what his life would look like there, with that team.

It wasn’t perfect, but he could make it okay.

James wasn’t shocked to have a knock at his door, as more guys filtered into town and members of the welcome-wagon went out of their way to say hello.

He was shocked to find Claude Giroux standing outside of his new apartment in Edmonton.

When Claude smiled, his eyes narrowed to slits, like a cat with a full belly.

“Found you,” Claude sang softly.

James balked, or he tried to, but he couldn’t find it in himself to be truly startled or upset. Not when that feeling was slipping over him more rapidly than ever before, warmth creeping in off a fireplace in winter, a thick blanket on a cold morning.

It felt _right_ for Claude to be there, to push past him into his apartment like he was welcome there.

Claude paced forward a few steps, giving the apartment a cursory glance, before he turned to face James and nodded. “This is cute and all, but it’s not the same. It’s time for you to come home.”

James couldn’t even choke at that, because to some part of his brain it made sense.

“I- what?”

He watched as Claude – since when was he Claude? – picked up an orange Oilers t-shirt that had been laid over the back of his couch, the first piece of team-branded clothing the team had given James to keep. Claude held it between two fingers, face scrunched like he was smelling something bad.

“This is just sad,” he said. He dropped the shirt, letting it puddle in a heap on the floor. When James made a noise of outrage, he looked up and flashed him a smile.

“You must be able to tell that it’s wrong. It might look close, to someone who doesn’t know better, and maybe you could trick yourself for a few minutes, but inside you know you’re just lying to yourself. Nashville gold, Calgary red…_Oilers_ orange…none of them could ever truly satisfy you. They aren’t what you need.”

There were questions that James ought to be asking, mostly in the vein of “What the fuck?”

But instead, what came out of his mouth was, “Then what _do_ I need?”

Claude’s smarmy, shit-eating grin grew ever larger as he strode up to James, catching his jaw in one palm just as he had so many years ago in Philadelphia, when James was miserable and Claude had awful hair and a worse mustache.

Except this time, James’s body acted on its own, following those slow, syrupy impulses. He leaned into Claude’s hand, nuzzled against it, feeling his short beard catch on Claude’s calluses.

Claude looked thrilled.

“This. Us. You need to be with your own kind.”

“My own kind?”

“Mhmm.” Claude nodded, scratching his fingers gently through James’s beard. “It was hard to pick it out at first – your beard was so bad when you were younger, and you shaved it off a lot. But once it grew in…then we could see it all. Knew you were one of us. Meant to be one of ours.”

James blinked slowly. Even if he didn’t have that sedated feeling, he was fairly sure these words still would not have made sense.

“What are you…my beard?”

Claude smiled and every ounce of anxiety fled his body as if a valve had been released.

“You’re one of us,” Claude repeated. “A ginger. The ones with the beards, you’re harder to track at first, but you usually show yourselves in the end. You can’t help it, none of us can. We’re drawn to each other, to our home. And you’ve been away for way too long.”

It didn’t make sense. Or rather, it _shouldn’t _make sense, because it was utterly, balls to the wall batshit insane, except…it made sense.

In James’s addled, giddy, _ginger_ mind, it made sense.

“But how…I play for Edmonton now.”

Claude cooed and patted his beard again. “Not anymore. You’re coming home, babe. They kept you from us for too long. Besides…”

He reached into his pocket, pulled out something that had been crumpled up in there.

“Don’t you want it?”

_It_ was a Flyers t-shirt, wrinkled from Claude’s pocket and largely identical to an Oilers shirt, aside from all of the ways that it wasn’t.

Edmonton’s merch felt good, but this…

James’s heart ached, his mind strained, and his hands itched, twitching towards the shirt.

He wanted it, more than he’d ever wanted anything before. He wanted to have it and own it and make it be real. He wanted to wear it and belong to it and go _home_.

“I can take you home,” Claude soothed, and James must have been talking out loud, or maybe Claude just knew that’s what he’d be thinking. It made sense, for Claude to know. They should all be able to read each other fairly easily; they were all connected, naturally.

They were just parts of the same whole. James could see that now.

Why had Paulie ever wanted to fight this?

“I want to go home,” James murmured, suddenly exhausted. Claude hummed and slid his hand around James’s neck and into his hair, pressing down until James dropped his face onto Claude’s shoulder.

“Then that’s what we’ll do,” he said. “You’ll feel better once we get back to Philly, where we belong.”

A sudden thought occurred to James. “What about the others? In, in Toronto and Ottawa and Colorado-”

Claude cut him off with a hush. “Don’t worry, babe. Everyone comes home in the end. We’re ginger; we belong in orange.”

James mumbled an affirmation and let his eyes slide closed.

It felt right.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm [swedishgoaliemafia](https://swedishgoaliemafia.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr.


End file.
